by Dean Koontz
Gunther was already standing up on the platform by the boarding gate, dressed in his Frankenstein monster mask and gloves. He saw Conrad and immediately went into his snarling-pawing-dancing act, the one he put on for the marks.
Ghost was at the ticket booth, breaking rolls of quarters and dimes and nickels into the change drawer, his colorless eyes were filled with the flickering, silvery images of tumbling coins.
“They're going to open the gate half an hour early,” Ghost said. “Everyone's set up and eager for business, and they say there's already a crowd of marks waiting outside.”
“It's going to be a good week,” Conrad said.
“Yeah,” Ghost said, pushing one slender hand through his spider-web hair. “I have the same feeling. Maybe you'll even get a chance to repay that debt.”
“What?”
“That woman you owe a debt to,” Ghost said. “The one whose children you're always looking for. Maybe you'll be lucky and find her here.”
“Yes,” Conrad said softly. “Maybe I will.”
* * *
At eight-thirty Monday night, Ellen Harper was sitting in the living room of the house on Maple Lane, trying to read an article in the latest issue of Redbook. She couldn't concentrate. Each time she reached the bottom of a paragraph, she couldn't remember what had been in it, and she had to go back and read it again. Eventually she gave up and just leafed through the magazine, looking at the pictures, while she sipped steadily from a glass of vodka and orange juice.
Although it was not late, she was already under the spell of the booze. She didn't feel good . Not by a long shot. Not bad, either. Just numb. But not yet numb enough.
She was alone in the room. Paul was in his workshop, out in the garage. He would come in at eleven o'clock, as usual, to watch the late news on television, and then he would go to bed. Joey was in his room, working on a model of his own— a plastic representation of Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera. Amy was upstairs, too, lying low. Except for a brief, fidgety appearance at the dinner table, the girl had been holed up in her room ever since returning from Dr. Spangler's office this afternoon.
The girl. The damned, defiant, wanton girl! Pregnant!
They didn't have the test results yet, of course. That would take a couple of days. But she knew. Amy was pregnant.
The magazine rustled in Ellen's tremulous hands. She put Redbook aside and went out to ú the kitchen to mix another drink.
She wasn't able to stop worrying about the bind she was in. She couldn't allow Amy to have the baby. But if Paul found out that she had gone behind his back to arrange an abortion, he would not be pleased. For the most part he was a meek man at home, gentle, easygoing, willing to let her run the house and, generally, their lives as well. But he was capable of anger if pushed far enough, and on those rare occasions when he lost his temper, he could be tough.
If Paul learned of the abortion after the fact, he would want to know why she hadn't told him, and he would demand to know why she had approved of such a thing. She would have to be able to provide a cogent explanation, a passionate self-defense. Right now, however, she didn't know what in God's name she would say to him if he ever found out about the abortion.
Twenty years ago, when she had married Paul, she should have told him about her year with the carnival. She should have confessed about Conrad and about the repulsive thing to which she had given birth. But she hadn't done what she should have done. She had been weak. She hid the truth from him. She was afraid he would loathe her and turn away from her if he knew about her mistakes. But if she had told him back then, at the very beginning of their relationship, she wouldn't be in such serious trouble now.
Several times during the course of their marriage, she had almost revealed her secrets to him. When he had talked about having a large family, there were a hundred times when she almost said, “No, Paul. I can't have children. I've already had one, you see, and it was no good. No good at all. It was a horror. It wasn't even human. It wanted to kill me, and I had to kill it first. Maybe that hideous child was solely a product of my first husband's damaged genes. Maybe my own genetic contribution wasn't to blame. But I can't take a chance.” Although she had been on the brink of making that confession countless times, she had never given voice to it, she had held her tongue, naively certain that love would conquer all—somehow.
Later, when she was pregnant with Amy, she almost went out of her mind with worry and fear. But the baby had been normal. For a short while, a few blessed weeks at most, she had been relieved, all doubts about her genetic fitness banished by the sight of that pink, giggly, supremely ordinary infant.
But before long it occurred to her that all freaks were not necessarily physically deformed. The flaw, the twisted thing, the horrible difference from normal people—that could be entirely in the mind. The baby she'd borne for Conrad was not merely deformed. It was wicked, it radiated wickedness, it reeked of malevolent intent, a monster in every sense of the word. But wasn't it r. conceivable that her new girl-child was just as wicked as Victor, except that there were no outward signs of it? Perhaps a worm of evil nestled deep within the child's mind, out of sight, - festering, waiting for the proper time and place to emerge.
Such a disturbing possibility was like an acid. It ate away at Ellen's happiness, it corroded and then destroyed her optimism. She soon ceased to take any pleasure in the baby's gurgling and cooing. She watched the child speculatively, wondering what nasty surprises it would spring on her in the future. Perhaps, one night, when the child was grown tall and strong, it would creep into its parents' bedroom and murder them in their sleep.
Or perhaps she was crazy, perhaps the child was as ordinary as it appeared to be, and the problem was in her own mind. That thought did occur to her rather frequently. But each time she began to question her sanity, she remembered the nightmarish battle with Conrad's vicious, bloodthirsty offspring, and that grisly, vivid memory never failed to convince her that she had good reason to be wary and afraid.
Didn't she?
For seven years she resisted Paul's desire to have another child, but she got pregnant in spite of her precautions. Again, she went through nine months of hell, wondering what sort of strange creature she was carrying in her womb.
Joey, of course, turned out to be a normal little boy.
On the outside.
But inside?
She wondered. She watched, waited, feared the worst.
After all these years, Ellen still wasn't sure what to think of her children.
It was a hell of a way to live.
Sometimes she was filled with a fierce pride and love for them. She wanted to take them in her arms and kiss them, hug them. Sometimes she wanted to give them all the affection that she never had been able to give them in the past, but after so many years of guarded feelings and continuous suspicion, she found it virtually impossible to open her arms to them and to accept such a dangerous emotional commitment with equanimity. There were times when she burned with love for Joey and Amy, times when she ached with a surfeit of unexpressed love, times when she wept at night, silently, without waking Paul, soaking her pillow, grieving for her own cold, dead heart.
At other times, however, she still thought she saw something supernaturally wicked in her progeny. There were terrible days when she was convinced they were clever, calculating, infinitely evil beings engaged in an elaborate masquerade.
Seesaw.
Seesaw.
The worst of it was her loneliness. She could not share her fears with Paul, for then she would have to tell him about Conrad, and he would be devastated to learn that she had been hiding a checkered past from him for twenty years. She knew him well enough now to understand that what she'd done in her youth would not upset him a tenth as much as the fact that she'd deceived him about it and had kept on deceiving him for so very long. So she had to deal with her fear by herself.
It was a hell of a way to live.
Even if she could make herself believe, once ,L' a
nd for all, that they were just two kids like any other two kids, even then her worries wouldn't be :- at an end. There was still the possibility that one of Amy's or Joey's children would be a monster like Victor. This curse might strike only one out of every two generations—the mother but not the child, the grandchild but not the great-grandchild. It might skip around at random, raising its ugly head when you least expected to see it. Modern medicine had identified a number of genetically transmitted diseases and inherited deficiencies that skipped some generations in a family and struck others, leapfrogging down the decades.
If she could only be sure that her first, monstrous baby had been the product of Conrad's rotten, degenerate spermatozoa, if she could just be certain that her own chromosomes were not corrupted, she would be able to lay her fear to rest forever. But of course there was no way she could determine the truth of the matter.
Sometimes she thought that life was too difficult and much too cruel to be worth the effort of living it.
That was why, now, standing in the kitchen on the night of the day that she had learned of Amy's pregnancy, Ellen tossed down the last of the drink that she had mixed only minutes ago, and she quickly poured another. She had two crutches: liquor and religion. She could not have withstood the past twenty-five years without both of those supports.
Initially, the first year after she left Conrad, religion alone was sufficient to her needs. She had gotten a job as a waitress, had become self-supporting after a rocky start, and had spent most of her spare time in church. She had found that prayer soothed her nerves as well as her spirit, that confession was good for the soul, and that a meager Communion wafer taken on the tongue during Mass was far more nourishing than any six-course meal.
At the end of that first year on her own, more than two years after she had run from home to join the carnival and to be with Conrad, she felt fairly good about herself. She still suffered from bad dreams most nights. She was still wrestling with her conscience, trying to make up her mind whether she had sinned terribly or had merely done God's work when she had killed Victor. But at least, as a hard-working waitress, she had gained a measure of self-respect and independence for the first time in her life. Indeed, she had felt sufficiently self-confident to return home for a visit, intending to patch up her differences with her parents as best she could.
That was when she discovered they had died in her absence. Joseph Giavenetto, her father, was felled by a massive stroke just one month after Ellen ran away from home. Gina, her mother, died less than six months later. It happened that way sometimes—wife and husband taking leave of life within a short time of each other, as if unable to tolerate the separation.
Although Ellen had not been close to her parents, and although Gina's excessive strictness and religiosity had created a great deal of tension and bitterness between mother and daughter, Ellen had been devastated by the news of their deaths. She was filled with a cold, empty, unfinished feeling. She blamed herself for what had happened to them. Running away as she had done, leaving nothing more than a terse, unpleasant note for her mother, not even saying goodbye to her father-with those actions she might have precipitated her father's stroke. Perhaps she was too hard on herself, but she wasn't able to shrug off the yoke of guilt.
Thereafter, her religion was not able to provide her with sufficient comfort, and she augmented the mercy of Jesus with the mercy of the bottle. She drank too much—more this year than last, not so much this year as next year. Only her family was aware of her habit. The churchwomen with whom she worked in charitable causes four days each week would be shocked to discover that the quiet, earnest, industrious, devout Ellen Harper was a different person at night, in her own home, after sunset, behind closed doors, the saint became a lush.
She despised herself for her sinfully excessive fondness for vodka. But without booze she couldn't sleep, it blocked out the nightmares, and it gave her a few hours of blessed relief from the worries and fears that had been eating her alive for twenty-five years.
She put the bottle of vodka and the quart of orange juice on the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Now, when her drink ran low, she wouldn't have to get up to freshen it, she would only have to bestir herself when her ice had melted.
For a while she sat in silence, drinking, but then, as she stared at the chair opposite her own, she had a memory-flash of Amy sitting there this morning, looking up, saying, “I've had some morning sickness, I missed my period, I'm really pregnant, I know I am . . .” Ellen remembered, far too vividly, how she had struck the girl, how she had shaken her senseless, how she had cursed her.
If she closed her eyes she could see herself pulling Amy onto the floor, pushing the girl's head down to the tiles, screaming like a madwoman, praying at the top of her voice . . .
She shuddered.
My God, she thought miserably, suddenly pierced by a painfully sharp insight, I'm like my mother! I'm exactly like Gina. I've cowed my husband just as she cowed hers. I've been so strict with my children and so preoccupied with my religion that I've built a wall between myself and my family—a wall exactly like the one that my mother constructed.
Ellen felt dizzy, but not merely from the vodka. The patterns of history, the familiar circles drawn by repetitive events, startled and dazed her.
She covered her face with her hands, shamed by the new light in which she suddenly saw herself. Her hands were cold.
The kitchen clock sounded like a ticking bomb.
Just like Gina.
Ellen grabbed her drink and took a long swallow of it. The glass chattered against her teeth.
Just like Gina.
She shook her head violently, as if she were determined to cast off that unwelcome thought. She wasn't as stern and distant and forbidding as her own mother had been. She wasn't. And even if she was, she couldn't deal with that insight now. With Amy's pregnancy, Ellen already had too much to worry about. She could deal with only one thing at a time. Amy's problem had to come first. If some horrible thing was growing in the girl's womb, it had to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. Maybe then, after the abortion, Ellen would be able to consider her life and decide what she thought of the woman she had allowed herself to become, maybe then she would have the time to reflect on what she had done to her family. But not now. God, please, not now.
She tilted her glass and chugged the rest of her drink as if it were only water. With an unsteady hand she poured a little more orange juice and a lot more vodka.
Most nights she wasn't really drunk until eleven or twelve o'clock, but tonight, by nine-thirty, Ellen was thoroughly intoxicated. She felt fuzzy, and her tongue was thick. She was floating dreamily. She had attained the pleasant, mindless state of grace that she had desired so strongly.
When she glanced at the kitchen clock and saw that it was nine-thirty, she realized it was Joey's bedtime. She decided to go upstairs, make sure he said his prayers, tuck him in, kiss him goodnight, and tell him a bedtime story. She hadn't told him any stories in a long, long time. He'd probably like that. He wasn't too old for bedtime stories, was he? He was still just a baby. A little angel. He had such a sweet, angelic, baby face. Sometimes she loved him so hard that she thought she'd explode. Like now. She was brimming with love for little Joey. She wanted to kiss his sweet face. She wanted to sit on the edge of the bed and tell him a story about elves and princesses. That would be good, so good, just to sit on the edge of the bed with him smiling up at her.
Ellen finished her drink and got to her feet. She stood up too fast, and the room spun around, and she grabbed the edge of the table in order to keep her balance.
Crossing the living room, she bumped into an end table and knocked over a lovely, hand-carved, wooden statue of Jesus, which she had bought a long time ago, in her waitressing days. The statue fell onto the carpet, and although it was only a foot high and not heavy, she fumbled awkwardly with it, trying to retrieve it and set it back where it belonged, her fingers felt like fat sausages and did
n't seem to want to bend the right way.
She wondered fleetingly if the bedtime story was a good idea after all. Maybe she wasn't up l to it. But then she thought of Joey's sweet face and his cherubic smile, and she went upstairs. The steps were treacherous, but she reached the second-floor hallway without falling.
When she entered the boy's room, she found that he was already in bed. Only the tiny nightlight was burning, a single small bulb in the wall plug, ghostly, moon-pale.
She stopped inside the doorway, listening. He usually snored softly when he slept, but at the moment he was perfectly quiet. Maybe he wasn't asleep yet.
Swaying with each step, she walked gingerly to the bed and looked down at him. She couldn't see much in the dim light.
Deciding that he must be asleep, wanting only to plant a kiss on his head, Ellen leaned close-
And a leering, luminous, inhuman face jumped out of the darkness at her, screeching like an angry bird.
She shrieked and staggered backwards. She collided with the dresser, hurting her hip.
In her mind she saw a kaleidoscopic tumble of dark, horrific images: a bassinet shaken by the fury of its monstrous burden, enormous, green, animal eyes gleaming with hatred, flared, twisted nostrils sniffing, sniffing, a pale, speckled tongue, long and bony fingers reaching for her in the flutter-flash of lightning, claws tearing at her . . .
The nightstand light came on, dispelling the awful memories.
Joey was sitting up in bed. Mama?” he said.
Ellen sagged against the dresser and drew deeply, thirstily of the air that, for a few seconds of eternal duration, she had been unable to draw into her lungs. The thing in the darkness had only been Joey. He was wearing a Halloween mask that had been shaded with phosphorescent paint.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, pushing away from the dresser, moving toward the bed.
He quickly pulled off the mask. His eyes were wide. “Mama, I thought you were Amy.”
“Give me that,” she said, snatching the mask out of his hands.